“Everyone” is an artist..”

london is a crazy city, its a magic city, and occasionally, one in a while, every so often i find myself in the middle of the most random situations and places, and it is then that i am more in love with this place than ever. most recently there was the weekend i stumbled into notbar on slater street, off brick lane.

and then the mobile disco party at the tate

mobile clubbing @ tate modern, i walk by with a camera around 2:09…

which was made even more random by the fact that after raving for two hours in the expansive turbine hall, hovering over "the crack" installation. me, my friend and my camera traipsed around london bridge for drinks, then crawled into a black cab to shoreditch, and headed over to nightclub cargo, where sinden was spinning..

i get to the cloakroom, turn to my friend (who had been holding the camera for me.. who shrugs and says ooops).  he has left the camera in the cab. and the camera is not my camera, it is a borrowed camera, and the tape,, the tape is now gone forever.

my friend is gutted, i mask my aggrivation as best as i can. there is nothing we can do i say, I’ll have to follow it up tomorrow. he goes to security to find out the cab driver had come looking to see if anyone had mentioned leaving a camera behind, he refused to hand it over to security.

for those that don’t live in this city, its hard to get a sense of the level of honour and respect attributed to black cab drivers. it is thought they can do no wrong, they never get lost, and there are many tales of urban valour involving returning precious property to flaky urbanites. i had faith i would get the camera back. i really didn’t doubt it.

and lo and behold i did get it back, and the footage. cities aren’t nearly as scary and selfish as they are  oft said to be…

so recently i have been spending every spare bit of time i can spare on the documentary i’m shooting, delving deeper and deeper into this funny old world of connectivity/digital communication/online partial identities. this has thrown up all kinds of new thoughts and challenged old ones. for example, the fact that i’ve deliberately clung to one screenname across different sites, on one hand challenging anyone interested and saavy enough to build a bigger picture,on the other hand enjoying the fact that i still retain a fair bit of the personal, because i’m constantly aware of what i’m putting out there.. or so i thought..

a friend i made online taught me a little lesson on the matter. you see i’m fully aware of what I put out there, but i never gave thought to the fact that there are so many other subsites that glean info from other sites, particularly on the dating agenda. for example there is a page, which logs myspace profiles. and despite the fact my profile is now set to private, my former profile remains in a bastardised version on this secondary site. i wouldn’t really care so much if it wasn’t for the fact my online presence is growing,and i must admit that i’m not terribly keen on the fact that there is a page out there with my picture capturing my profile in the days when my sexuality was marked as "unsure". ah well. worse things have been said about me and others.

also in the world of connectivity, the last few months have seen me experimenting with the world of online dating. and i can honestly say it has been a thoroughly enjoyable experience and i am very pleased to have met all i have met. i already consider most of those i’ve met to be friends that i would not soon like to lose touch with. but the problem with me being such a compulsive socialite, and an online addict of sorts (a friend told me to join twitter today, and i did, and i’m really not sure why ) and not being "anchored" by a relationship, is i find that i have so many people in my life right now, that if i add any more i really will reach breaking point, where many will have demands even the impressively elastic diary can not fulfil. and so i’m going to delete my profile this week. which feels strange. it did kind of become emblematic of the randomness of my life of late, the wondrous strangers who have become friends, the adventures and energy new people bring. yes i could just leave it there, and not really use it. but i’ve met everyone i’ve wanted to meet on there now, and those people have migrated to my facebook, mobile phone book, gmail contacts. so therein lies the era, and i think i may have to film myself saying all this, deleting it, explaining why.

and its  very relevant to my film, which is swiftly becoming a snapshot not just of this period in time, with my generation, around all this digital madness, but also of the way my offline friends engage with me so much online, and how my online friends have translated into offline ones. and i’m liking that.

and as a postscript to all this, it appears that due to last nights interview, this blogger <i.e. me> has been blogged.  and adding that link just now feels like standing in between two warped mirrors or something…